Posts Tagged "academics"

KI tries to stay in touch with the scientists and academics who’ve come through our events, to track the progress of their projects, monitor the impact of the Sandpit (also known as Ideas Lab) and how it accelerates scientific innovation and also just to hear from participants, with some time to reflect, about their experience at our workshops. Here’s another Sandpit tale, following up on two Sandpit projects that we’ve had the privilege of midwifing in the last few years.

Science is a subject available to both genders and yet women, if not directly discouraged, haven’t been as encouraged to pursue it as a field of study. Girls are steered toward languages and the liberal arts, implying that maths and sciences are better left to the boys. It’s a stereotype that’s been torn down and yet the gender imbalance is still apparent in the field of scientific research and academics.

So much depends on getting the right people in the room. A workshop designed to produce innovative outcome can fail – even with the perfect agenda design and the most astute facilitators – if the people who’ve been assembled don’t have the right spirit and motivation to help it succeed. But how do you get the right minds in the right place?

It’s not that research proposals solicited in a more traditional method haven’t been innovative or produced good science. They have, and they still do, and not every research topic merits a Sandpit initiative. But because the Sandpit format involves a diverse group of people and forces them to catalyse and collide and collaborate, the output is often unique and innovative. Questions arise that wouldn’t otherwise have been posed, and partnerships form between people from very different scientific disciplines.